~ Perspective from Vancouver

Walk Like a Penguin and Ignore the Sand on Spanish Banks

As hard as it may seem to everyone else in the country we have not been dealing with the cold, the snow, and especially the icy conditions of the city sidewalks and bike routes too well. Usually a slippery frosty day or two subsides tearfully into rain and all that messy ice disappears. But that hasn’t happened this time, and Price Tags ruefully looks at the vacationing Mayor of Vancouver in Mexico and our own Gordon Price in Buenos Aires with great envy.

There have been some news items about people slipping and falling on the ice and Global News has helpfully let us know that “German trauma surgeons advised the public on Wednesday to walk like penguins to avoid slipping on pavements with freezing temperatures forecast nationwide over the next few days. An advisory published on the website of the German Society of Orthopaedics and Trauma Surgery said that walking like the aquatic birds involves leaning the torso forward so that the centre of gravity is on the front leg.”

With our shortage of road salt, some ingenious citizens have turned to the city’s beaches to load up on sand. We have all heard about property encroachment on beaches, but never people actually TAKING the beach. As CBC reported, this theft of City sand was accomplished by using scooping tools such as Starbucks cups.

The Parks Board is not happy about the beach sand theft. “Despite the high demand for a fix, Howard Normann — Vancouver’s director of parks — said people shouldn’t look to the beach for a solution. “I know some people are desperate to get something down onto their sidewalks to prevent people from slipping and falling … but we do not want people to start coming down there and start loading up truckloads of beach sand,” he said. “That’s an integral part of our ecosystem and our beachscape.”